A Right to the Future: Student Debt and the Politics of Crisis

Abstract

In September of 2008, when the banking giant Lehman Brothers collapsed, lending came to a halt.Borrowers across the globe were left holding outsized debts and declining credit scores.Consumers in the United States soon showed that they wanted out of the credit trap.From 2008 to 2012, U.S. households reduced their financial liabilities by $1.3 trillion (Federal Reserve Bank of New York 2013).They "deleveraged" in all areas but one: student debt.By 2012, this rising level of debt already represented a 70 percent increase in the number of borrowers and a 70 percent increase in the sum of each borrower's loans from just 2004 (Brown et al. 2013).In 2018, outstanding student debt crossed the $1.5 trillion mark.This balance represents growth of more than 170 percent from the years just before the crash (Federal Reserve Bank of New York 2017).Since 2008, exploding student debt balances have become a signal feature of finance.Another, less heralded change has accompanied this upsurge.In 2010-two years after the financial meltdown-the federal government took over the student

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